The Tweeting Dead — Some Thoughts on Zombie Twitter

For a second day running, #RIPTwitter is trending. It seems everyone has an opinion about the apparent death of Twitter and can’t help themselves from… tweeting about it.

The irony here is obvious to everyone, including Musk himself — who seems to be revelling in it.

To which, a counterpoint:

It’s telling that even in the death throes of the platform itself, it’s still the place we run to when we have thoughts to share. Twitter is the default town square of the internet, and we never established where we were supposed to gather if the town square itself caught fire.

Comparisons to the sinking of the Titanic have been aplenty over the week. And it has indeed been a privilege tweeting with y’all over the years. But is the situation so dire?

Do we really think Twitter is going anywhere?

On the one hand, firing most of your core engineering team and creating a culture so toxic that the rest voluntarily choose to leave seems very bad. Twitter had a reputation — at least early on — for being a bit unstable, and the ‘fail whale’ still makes an occasional appearance. But what are the chances it simply stops working?

The answer to that is beyond me. I don’t have the technical knowledge to talk about what it takes to keep the services that form Twitter up and running. But we’ve already seen important features like 2FA simply… stop working.

And there have been reports of issues with the timeline on mobile platforms, slow notifications, and other potentially worrying signs. These could be teething problems during a significant company transformation; I simply don’t know.

But the critical question is not the technical question but the cultural one.

Twitter is dead if we all say it is

I know it’s not pleasant, but I want you to think about disco music for a moment.

What happened to disco? Did they stop making disco records? Not at all. But did disco fade out of popularity? Yes, it arguably did.

I’m not a music historian by any means. I can’t speak to the evolution of disco into the electro-funk and later new wave movements, but I can confidently say that mainstream crowds don’t dance much to disco music anymore. At least not in the clubs I visit.

It doesn’t take something to literally “die” for it to stop being culturally relevant. It’s enough for everyone to say it is.

(Sidenote: You see this happening in tech quite frequently. Google Glass and Stadia are two products that spring to mind. Both were killed off more by toxic public opinion than product issues. But thems the brakes).

It’s even happened in the social media space before. MySpace never stopped working — apart from that time it deleted everyone’s info. We all just went to Facebook instead. And Facebook has undergone a decline of its own, with Instagram and WhatsApp eating most if not all of its lunch.

So maybe Musk will turn Twitter around. It seems unlikely, but perhaps we’ll see a better, more feature-filled Twitter than ever. But it will almost certainly be too late. We might already be gone.

Will people leave, though?

I don’t know about this one. People love to make a show of leaving. Big dramatic exits are a whole genre of tweet. And most people that go end up coming back pretty sharpish.

Compare the ‘Meta boycott’ in the wake of… well, lots of things. Many people and brands made a show of deleting their accounts and stopping ads. I don’t know how many have stuck to that consistently, but I don’t get the sense that Facebook is now a dead platform. It’s about as active as it’s been for the last decade. It seems fine.

And Twitter might be the same. Or even worse, Twitter might prove to be a drug too addictive to quit so easily. I had one of my most viral tweets of all time this month, and I’m so so close to the 5,000-follower mark. I know none of that matters, but over the last 13 years, I’ve let myself believe it does. So quitting Twitter isn’t even something I can make a rational decision about — it’s too clouded by emotion.

I’ve made amazing friends over the years on Twitter. It’s opened doors for me in terms of my career. And I’ve grown a micro-audience that I genuinely care about. Performatively, I might say I’m quitting — but I don’t know if I can.

Where would we even go anyway?

Quitting Twitter is made all the more difficult by the lack of a clear alternative. And let’s talk about the woolly mammoth in the room: Mastodon.

Don’t get me wrong; Mastodon seems cool. I like the idea of a decentralised pick-your-own social media experience. Aligning my values with a platform that matches my specific preferences is a lovely idea. But Mastodon is not Twitter.

For one, the user experience is a nightmare. I’ve tried to explain it to so many people, and everyone gets stuck on the server bit. I compare it to email, where you can make an account with a specific domain, but you can still email anyone else. But this isn’t the language we’ve been taught to speak about social media. And I worry that’ll damage its ability to grow beyond us nerdy early adopters.

And what the hell is a “federated timeline?”

So yeah, best of luck to them. And please FOLLOW ME on there. But the jury’s out on this one.

A more likely alternative is that we continue to spread our digital identity further amongst the current platforms. I’m already doing this a bit, with LinkedIn replacing quite a bit of my professional thinking. I regularly cross-post tweets there, and they do as well or better than on Twitter.

This is the natural ebb and flow of social media. BeReal has replaced what I used my IG Stories for — raw, unfiltered ‘what I’m up to’ content. TikTok has replaced YouTube for my ‘mindless entertainment’ content.

I used to spend hours on Neopets every day after school. Do I still check it? Not even once in the last year. This is fine.

And like my Neopets, Twitter may be “dying”, but it’s probably not going anywhere. We might all leave, or at least say we will, but your dumb tweets are probably fine.